


Firehead

by mortalitasi



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:10:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Garrus visits Shepard in her cabin after Tuchanka. The experience has left her rattled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firehead

He catches her when she’s coming out of the bathroom with a towel slung over one shoulder, drops of water clinging to her bare shoulders.

The light of the shower dies behind her as she steps out into the room, and it’s not until she slaps the towel over the back of one of the chairs beside the bed that she catches sight of him standing behind her desk. She jumps high enough to clear the seat, and his visor catches the detail of the goosebumps raised on the skin of her upper arms. 

"Jesus, Garrus! Since when do you creep around like that?" she says, running a hand compulsively through her hair as though that’ll soften the shock of seeing him there. "Did Thane pass the art onto you or something? Shit."

He laughs at the joke and ignores the sting as he descends the little staircase by the desk, watching as the glow of the fishtank swims on the floor and the ceiling. It looked like this the night he came to her before the Omega 4 Relay— quiet. She says she likes being underwater. Space without the stars, she’d told him. He’d been holding her that night and running the words over and over in his head. He hadn’t known why it’d stuck with him like that until he’d seen one of the Illium skald fish bump its beak against the top of the tank. 

 _Space without the stars._  And he’d thought about her breaking out of the water, laughing at the feeling of the air on her face and combing her arms out in crisscrosses in front of her, ripples of silken sunlight spreading under her fingers. He’d thought of her clawing at the neck of her suit as the last of the oxygen hissed out and away from the emergency reserves, and felt slightly sick at the idea of her drowning in a void— in nothing. 

He’d turned his back on the fishtank and sat there with his chin in her hair, careful not to scratch her with his talons. Humans are so soft and fragile. Grab them a little harder than usual and they go red, or purple, or yellow, sometimes even green. They bruise and bleed easily, like the fruit of their terran trees. They’re quick to anger and quick to grieve. Emotional. He supposes that’s why he gets along better with them than his own people. He’s never been good at being a turian, anyhow.

Talking is another thing he’d always left to his superiors, but he’s been standing here for a good few seconds now and she looks like she’s expecting him to do something. The shadows of Tuchanka are still clinging to her face.

"Your hair," he finally says, and her eyes flick up at him. "It’s… different?"

"Yeah," she admits, ruffling it again. She clears her throat and looks at her feet, so she doesn’t see the amused twitch of his mandibles. 

"If I didn’t know you better, Shepard, I’d say you were  _embarrassed_ ,” he remarks, and watches in satisfaction as her cheeks darken. How rare. 

She makes a sound not unlike a growl and grabs the towel from the chair to toss at him. He catches it easily in one hand and lets it fall to the bed.

"Good thing you do, then," she says with mock flippancy as she turns her back and pretends to look at the datapads piled on her nightstand. He hears her suck in a little breath when he moves up to stand beside her, just a step behind. It makes him— proud? is the word?— that he can get a reaction like that out of her a year later. She looks at him over her shoulder and murmurs, "I reddened it."

He stares at the new color under the glow of the desk lights. The change is subtle enough to go unnoticed at first glance, but big enough of a difference to niggle at the mind of someone who’s known her for a while. He’s not sure how long it’s going to take to get used to this color. It’s almost scarlet. He’s seen it on her armor more times than he’d care to count. The next thing she says is so low he nearly misses it.

"Do you like it?"

He has to think about what to say before answering. Shepard never asks people what they think— she does things and then lets everyone sit and stew about the consequences. She’s never once stopped mid-action or hesitated or requested for the vote of the majority to help her come to a conclusion. She didn’t even let him object to being ardat-yakshi bait (pretty wonderful-looking bait with great legs, mind you, but bait nonetheless). 

Garrus lets a length of her hair slip over his knuckles, fascinated by the way it dips into the crevices between his fingers. It’s such an odd thing, hair, and he may never have learned to appreciate it if it weren’t for her. 

"It suits you."

He sees the corner of her mouth lift in a sheepish smile, even if she’s supposedly facing away from him. 

"Good," she says, "because I wasn’t going to change even if it didn’t."

 _There we go_ , he thinks. That sounds more familiar. He listens to her chuckle in reflex when the tip of his scarred mandible feathers against the side of her neck.

"And I wouldn’t have expected you to."


End file.
